They read everything that was fresh and innovative. Every one of them had read Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“I knew her name,” said Ellis. “She’d been in The Forum magazine, and her first book was out. Afterwards I asked her did she want to come to a party. It was at our place on Macdougal Street—Jimmy Light and Suzie and Kenny Burke and me—& we were sitting in front of our fireplace drinking mulled wine. It was an extremely cold winter, one of the coldest in the history of the city, I believe. We’d burn anything we could find, wooden street signs, anything. Then we’d put the poker in the wine to heat it. Little Vincent was sitting there with us and had a couple of glasses and we were all talking intensely.
“I suddenly looked up at her and she was green, positively green. I took her to the bathroom and told her what to do and she did it, and she was all right after that. She was such a shy little girl, right out of Vassar.”
On the twenty-fourth of November, Vincent wrote Norma and asked her to come share her life in New York:
Am sending you twenty dollars. If you can’t make that do all right, telegraph me, or, no, Hunk, I’ll just send you twenty-five instead, & let you save all you can of it. It’s going to be hard, baby,—we’ll probably want money pretty bad pretty often,—but no unworthy girl ever had so many friends as I have, & we shan’t starve, because we can borrow.—I’m as crazy to see you as if I were going to be married to you—no one is such good pals as we are—I want you to bum around with—to cook breakfasts with.
They were, she told her, with an optimism that was young and high, “bound to succeed—can’t keep us down—I’m all enthusiasm & good courage about it. So come on out, my dear old sweet Sister,—& we’ll open our oysters together.”
2
On Sunday morning, December 2, 1917, Vincent and Kathleen met Norma in Grand Central Terminal and had breakfast together. “She was so pretty,” Kathleen wrote their mother, she “looked blooming.” Now, with Kay having been accepted at Vassar, they were “Three New Yorkers,” Norma scribbled on the face of their mother’s envelope. Years later Norma would describe her entrance into this new world somewhat less glowingly than Charles Ellis had:
It may have been a wonderful winter to you, Charlie Ellis, but we nearly starved to death that first winter in New York. Or froze. Vincent had this little hall bedroom on West 9th Street. Well, the gas main froze. She put a bouquet of violets on the window sill and they froze. We stayed in bed together for two days once just to keep warm.
And, then, this boy I knew from Maine came in to town and came upstairs and told us to get up. He was taking us to dinner. The first thing we asked him was how he got by our German landlady. He said, “I told her I was your brother.” “And what did she say?” Vincent asked. “She said, ‘Ya! and my Brudder, too!’ ”
But up he came and took us to Tom & Jerry’s, and it was our first good meal in I don’t know how long.
Less than two weeks after Norma’s arrival, Vincent had bound copies of Renascence in her hands. The book was published on December 17, 1917. She sent her first copy home, inscribed “To my Mother,” and quoted these stanzas from “Tavern”:
I’ll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill’s crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May set them down and rest.
…
Aye, ’tis a curious fancy—
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
December the fifteenth
1917
Millay received one letter that pleased her more than any of the superb reviews. It was from Edward J. Wheeler, one of the three judges who had voted against her winning the prize in The Lyric Year. “It has just come, and it is wonderful,” he wrote. “It gives me a sort of choky feeling in my throat. I had not known that there was so much beauty in the world.… I don’t know how you could do it,—you a mere school-girl. I can’t say anything, as yet, of any critical value. I don’t want to. I am just feasting.”
But Miss Dow’s note stung:
I have wondered why some of those poems I had heard most praised were omitted, probably for some good reason. Of course I am happy to have an “author’s copy,” and hope it is only the beginning of better things.… If I had not heard from several sources how bored you have been in the atmosphere of our home, I would have been glad to have you bring Norma up to dinner some time—but I hesitate to suggest a return to a place which seems to have been dull.
If that weren’t clear enough, she added that Vincent would always be as welcome as she was when “we were all you had.”
At an audition for the Provincetown Players in December Edna Millay met Floyd Dell, who was casting his play The Angel Intrudes. He needed an ingenue, someone who was fresh and quick and bright, about whom it could be said, “Annabelle is little. Annabelle’s petulant upturned lips are rosebud red. Annabelle’s round eyes are baby-blue. Annabelle is—young.”
He waited impatiently one snowy afternoon at the tiny theater on Macdougal Street to listen to the young woman who had come to read for the part.
Floyd Dell was thirty when he met Edna Millay that December and gave her the part of his ingenue. He was divorced, an apostle of the shocking new Freudian school of psychoanalysis, and he was one of the editors of The Masses, a radical new magazine, which had been indicted by the government the previous October under the Espionage Act. “Which was being used not against German spies,” he would write in his autobiography, Homecoming, “but against American Socialists, Pacifists and anti-war radicals.” He faced, along with the founding editor, Max Eastman, Art Young, John Reed, and other editors, cartoonists, and writers, a twenty-year imprisonment.
In the fall of 1916, George Cram Cook brought the Provincetown Theatre on Cape Cod to New York, where a theater was made in the parlor floor of a brownstone on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village. Floyd Dell’s play King Arthur’s Socks was on its first New York bill—along with Louise Bryant’s The Game and Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff.
Now, with The Masses forced to suspend publication, Dell had no job, and the novel he was writing was stymied. He decided to get involved in Cook’s production of his play.
The morning of the first rehearsal, Millay knew all her lines by heart. Dell observed her closely. “Without demur or delay she did whatever she was asked to do. She was eager to please; and it appeared she especially wished to please me.”
In photographs Floyd Dell looks bland and milky, with lank pale hair drawn like a wing across his wide brow, eyes as pale as his skin. Norma remembered him wearing soft flannel checked shirts, “and always with his shirt-tail out. You have to understand that Floyd Dell was special to us in those first days in New York,” she continued. “Oh, he could introduce Vincent to so many things she’d missed and didn’t know about. She was impressed by all these people. She never took me to rehearsals. And I’d been in everything in high school.”
The play opened on December 28. Edna was pronounced “delightful as Annabelle” by the author and the others in the Provincetown Players. In celebration, she was invited to join the troupe.
The Provincetown Players planned to produce Sweet & Twenty, another one of Dell’s one-act plays, at the end of January 1918. There was a good part in it for Edna, if she wanted it, and Dell asked her to read the script and decide. She said she’d rather have him read it to her. And so, a little stiffly, for they were on somewhat formal terms with each other, Dell invited her to the basement dining room at the Brevoort Hotel. When he arrived to pick her up, her landlady stopped her and demanded the overdue rent. Dell quickly intervened and paid it. “Edna,” he remembered, “was much humiliated but unable to refuse.” But neither let that spoil their dinner, and soon they were talking eagerly. Then, rashly, Dell told her he’d dreamed of her the night before. She watched him quietly and said that she had dreamed of him, too. He’d tell his dream
if she’d tell hers, he said shyly. But she refused, “coldly,” he remembered.
He had dreamed that he was sitting beside her on a sofa in her room watching her hand on her knee. He wanted to clasp it in his but was afraid to and hesitated. Then suddenly he did take her hand and kissed her. “It was,” he wrote, “a simple wish-fulfillment dream. But I hadn’t known that I had any such wish.” After supper Dell walked her home.
We went on to her room—where I had never been before. There was a big iron-framed bed, a small fireplace, and among other furniture a battered old sofa. In the fireplace blazed a cheerful fire, lit by Edna when we came in; it was chiefly of newspapers. I sat on the sofa with my play in my lap. Her hand lay on her knee, just as in my dream the night before. I wanted to take her hand, but was afraid to. However, encouraged by that dream, I did venture to take her hand—and the next moment we were in each other’s arms, kissing; and then she said, in a husky, vibrant violin-like tone that I had never heard before except in my dream, “I’m so glad you wanted to kiss me, Floyd.”
Then she mumbled something about her own dream, and they drifted into another kiss. “She talked as if she were breaking a long silence,” he remembered, “as if now, in my arms, she was free to speak her mind without fear.”
Soon, to Dell’s delight, they were seeing each other every day. But even this early in their relationship, Dell was anxious. When Edna wanted to know why he was in analysis, he spoke about certain “faults of character.” His inconstancy and fickleness with women troubled him. Edna was unconvinced. She said she’d noticed that his girls remained friends after they had stopped being lovers. Dell laughed and said that at thirty he had had enough love affairs. Edna didn’t think romantic love could last long in any case—she wanted to be in bed with him now, but she also insisted that their relationship continue “platonically.”
He watched her undress in her little room while the fire died down, carefully folding her clothes and placing them on a chair, before she slipped into bed. As they lay in each other’s arms, they kissed and talked, and he thought to himself that if she really wanted their companionship in bed to continue without going further, “I would conform to her wish.”
And it appeared that this was just how she wished it to be. Lying in my arms, not beneath but always above me, she kissed me with kisses that were for the most part sweet and dreamy but were sometimes fierce and agonized.
At first he considered it some peculiarly New England form of “bundling.” He fully expected that his “patience and devotion would be rewarded in the natural course of events.” But it wasn’t.
Dell was living in a basement room on Charlton Street. It was large and comfortable and bright with the Japanese prints Arthur Ficke had given him. He had built his bed in such a way that it resembled a low divan, and when Vincent admired it, he offered to build her one when she moved. Dell remembered one night turning out all the lights save one, over which he draped a colored silk scarf. Undressing slowly, admiring each other, they lay in bed, again kissing tenderly and chastely. They talked, and they argued.
She attacked my Freudian views and I defended them. I argued somewhat reluctantly and awkwardly, for a Freudian defense could not be conducted in amusing phrases—and besides, I felt that she wasn’t listening to anything I said. I had a notion that she was using intellectual argument as a means of cooling off my erotic feelings, and her own, too. In this earnest debate we would now and then sit up in bed, she with her lamp-lit torso and small firm breasts confronting me with impudent audacity while she defended platonic love against Freud.
To her (so far as I could make out) the Freudian program required woman’s complete sexual surrender to man—which might be inevitable but which brought an inescapable penalty; for when a girl gave herself completely to her lover, he would soon stop being in love with her—and then she could pine for him forlornly or turn lightly to another lover.
Dell thought this was nonsense and told her so. She thought it was entirely true and that he ought not to be impatient with her. She would keep their love the way it was, in its beauty. They had then known each other less than a month.
Dell helped Vincent find new rooms at 139 Waverly Place, “a fairly large room on the second floor, at the back. It had a corner washbowl with hot and cold taps.” The following day he built her a wooden frame for her bed just like his. Then he put up shelves around the washbasin and brought her some colored dishes from Vantine’s and hung a Hiroshige print of Arthur’s.
Norma, one evening, made a witty remark, and Edna said to me, “Give my little sister a kiss for that.” Norma came and put herself in my arms, our lips met in a kiss—and together we floated off in a blissful trance.… and clung together in that dreamy kiss, which went on and on until we were at last wakened by the sound of Edna’s sobbing. Norma, filled with remorse, ran to her. Edna was apologetic about her outburst. And I went away.
After this passage (which was left only in an unpublished manuscript), Dell records that none of them ever mentioned the incident again.
Norma insisted it hadn’t happened. When I pressed her—why would Dell invent such a scene? It wasn’t really about him, it was about the relationship between the sisters, wasn’t it?—she said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember. You’d have to ask Floyd, wouldn’t you?” Since Floyd Dell has been dead for years, the only record left was Norma’s memory.
Years, not weeks or months, but truly years have passed, and we were talking about their other sister, Kathleen—about the enmity that can grow between sisters like a malignancy—when Norma did remember that kiss: “Well, yes, okay! I do remember Vincent’s asking Floyd to kiss me. Why should she? But why should I not? So I suppose I gave him everything I got. I suppose we got caught up in some long lovely kiss. I don’t mean anything vulgar. And, then, yes, she was crying. You see, there was this change in Vincent. In Camden, I was the girl all the boys wanted to take out. Well, things had changed in New York, she’d published Renascence. That made quite an impression in New York. They’d heard of Vincent.”
“One day it occurred to me to wonder what was the Freudian explanation of her persistence in ‘platonic’ behavior in bed,” Dell wrote, “and the answer came to my mind instantly.” The next time they were in bed together, Dell told her he’d guessed her secret: “You pretend that you have had many love affairs—but the truth, my dear, is that you are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls at college.”
Dell says she was astonished and defensive about her behavior. “No man has ever found me out before!” she said. He “lectured her, instructively, affectionately, scornfully. I felt that it was my duty to rescue her from her psychological captivity.” But he refused any longer to take part in what he later called their platonic “performances.”
Shortly after that confrontation, he came swinging into her place with a bag of groceries for dinner, only to find her “sitting adoringly” at the feet of a college friend. “Edna told me that she had forgotten to tell me that she had a dinner date with Imogene [as he called her]. I went to the kitchen corner and unpacked the groceries, and went out. Something ailed me, and at first I didn’t know what it was. I was stricken, confused, shattered.” (In an earlier draft of this memoir Dell added another sentence: “It was in fact a violent attack of jealousy.”) He felt he could never see Edna again.
Norma came to him at last and asked what had happened. He could not tell her. But he went back to Waverly Place to say good-bye to Edna. At first he couldn’t speak. Edna asked him to tell her what was troubling him. “I managed with great difficulty to say a few words about her lies.”
She listened to him gravely and told him she had not lied to him, she had simply forgotten. She was not in love with the girl, she never had been, and she would not lie to him. He believed her.
After their reconciliation, Floyd awoke one morning with the feeling of spring, though there was still snow on the ground. He felt that he had a rare girl waiting for him, a
nd he dressed quickly and ran to her.
I rang her bell (with my special ring), and, after a brief interval, the door clicked to admit me. I ran up the stairs and opened the door. She was alone and in bed. I locked the door and went and sat on her bed. She put her arms about me, and we kissed.… and then [she] closed her eyes and seemed to sleep. I took off my clothes and got into bed with her. Was she really sleeping, or only pretending, as my love-making began? Anyway, there was nothing platonic about it. She was yielding herself to me, sweetly and completely.
Her sleepy dreaminess went on until she seemed to awaken “with an air of being surprised at what she found herself doing”; but she did not stop him, and she was no longer simply yielding. Afterward, stroking his pale silky hair as he curled next to her, she said—almost to herself, it seemed to him—“I shall have many lovers.”
CHAPTER 13
Dell felt that their happiness together was “paradisal.” He noticed that she continued to see her college friend, but it no longer bothered him. When he told her this, she smiled and said it was because now they were lovers. “This was said in her occasional hard-boiled or down-to-earth manner,” he wrote. But when she added, “Now that you are having a normal sex-life you are not so sensitive and easily upset,” that did bother him: she hadn’t said “we,” and she hadn’t said “love.”
But she was no longer shy or hesitant, and at his apartment they were free from interruption by Norma, who after all shared Vincent’s room on Waverly Place. Dell remembered placing a long gilt-framed mirror
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